A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Simplicity and Lent

    I’ve recently started reading a book called Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth by Jim Merkel. Merkel worked for years as an engineer designing weapons systems for arms dealers(!) until, one day, sitting in a bar in Sweden he watched the tv coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Struck by his (and everyone’s) complicity in the lifestyle that made such a disaster possible, he went back to California and went from being “a jet-set military salesman who voted for Regan” to “a bleeding-heart pacifist, eco-veggie-head-hooligan”: he quit his job, and began to use his engineer’s brain to calculate how he could live in a way that reduced his ecological footprint to sustainable levels. The first part of the book describes his research into the theoretical underpinnings of more sustainable ways of living, while the second part offers tips for putting it into practice.

    I’m not an ecological catastrophist, but I’m also not not an ecological catastrophist. I think global warming is real, but I also think it’s possible that we may develop some kind of technological fix. But it’s hard to escape the sense that we’re living on borrowed time and that we won’t be able to dodge the bullet forever, whatever form it comes in (peak oil? avian flu? mad cow disease?). So, there’s certainly a case to be made that it behooves all of us to reduce our footprint, even if most of us aren’t going to go as far as Jim Merkel (though I’m open to arguments that we should).

    But given that it is Lent, I think there’s also a spiritual dimension to the practice of simplicity that’s worth thinking about. Even if living more simply isn’t necessarty to stave off ecological disaster, it’s hard to overlook the fact that a modest lifestyle has been commended by sages of all traditions. Plato and Aristotle along with the Church fathers and doctors, were pretty much of one voice in commending simplicity, moderation, and frugality (and parallels in other traditions are easily spotted). As C.S. Lewis once observed, our society is unique not in the pursuit of wealth, but in upholding it as one of the highest goods, in opposition to the virtually unanimous counsel of our tradition.

    I tend to think of the fasting of Lent as intended in part to create a “space” in our lives where God can be present. There’s a traditional line of thought which says that, since God is by definition present everywhere, the barrier to our awareness of that presence lies in us. And one way of building that barrier is by filling up our lives with distractions. Blaise Pascal (the inspiration for this blog’s title) said with typical hyperbole that “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” I take this to mean that our penchant for distraction makes us unable to perceive reality as it really is.

    Simplicity as a spiritual discipline (which needn’t, it seems to me, be sharply distinguished from doing it for other reasons) might then be understood as an attempt to “cleanse the doors of perception.” Part of our problem is that we tend not to see reality as it really is, but instead as something for us. Instead of affirming reality with Augustine’s “being qua being is good” we ask “what’s in it for me?” This is arguably the root of our mistreatment of nature; we see it primarily as a resource for our use rather than as a gift and something that has intrinsic value. Perhaps the practice of simplicity can be a way of “letting things be” and seeing them as the handiwork of a loving Creator.

    On a more practical level, giving up something – a food, an activity, etc. – can allow us to spend more time doing the things we are always struggling to make time for, like prayer or helping others. I know I could certainly stand to spend more time doing both of those things. Lent seems like a good time to reflect on how I could live more simply, and hopefully this book will be of some help.

  • A veggie Lent

    Perhaps as one of your Lenten disciplines you’ve decided to give up meat (our Orthodox bothers and sisters go full-on vegan for
    Lent). If so, you may be wondering “What am I going to eat for the next 40 days?” Well, The Order of Santa Ignora has got you covered.

    Who knows, you might like it so much you’ll decide to make it a year-round thing.

  • More on giving teeth to JWT

    In a comment to the previous post, Michael Westmoreland-White asks a fair question of Just War theory:

    Has JWT EVER led to massive civil disobedience and refusal to fight on the part of a church’s members? Pacifists have often been arrested or executed for refusing to fight. When has this been true of JWTers? CAN the doctrine be given “teeth” or will it always just be a sop to the consciences of nationalistic warriors?

    The reason this is an important question is that, if the only effect of JWT is to bless whatever wars the government undertakes, then it’s not functioning as a theory of the morality of warfare. And I think it’s fair to say that many American Christians have gone along with the state’s war plans while using the rhetoric of just war more as a fig leaf than as a critical tool. Both the mainline and evangelical churches have been guilty of buying into forms of nationalism that serve to blunt criticism of the government’s actions, especially during wartime. It’s also worth pointing out that the vast majority of Christians aren’t taking to the street to engage in civil disobedience in protest of any of the other great evils our society is complicit in, whether that be abortion, poverty, ecological degradation, or what have you.

    Still, it has to be pointed out that many Christians, both clergy and laypeople, who have protested war have done so for broadly Just War reasons. Unless we’re going to assume, for instance, that everyone who protested the Vietnam war was a committed pacifist, there must’ve been at least some cases where opposition was motivated by people concluding that the war didn’t meet the standards of a just war. And I think it’s safe to say that this has been the case in more recent years as well. The mainline churches, none of which are officially pacifist, have been very critical of the Iraq war and many of their members took part in demonstrations protesting it. Granting all that, though, it’s safe to say, I think, that JWT doesn’t provide the controlling template for how most American Christians think about war.

    Whether or not JWT can become more effective as a genuine restraint on Christians’ willingness to participate in unjust wars depends, I think, on whether it can be effectively taught. My evidence is strictly anecdotal, but my impression is that JWT is rarely taught or discussed in most congregations. No moral framework can be put into practice if it isn’t taught and received. And this is true of any morality. Sexual morality doesn’t require abstinence in all cases, but it does require the practice of restraint and discrimination, as well as the development of virtues necessary for that practice. Likewise, putting JWT into practice means not just learning a theory, but also learning the virtues of restraint, moderation, and justice as well as faith, hope, and charity. That it hasn’t been taught and internalized isn’t necessarily a knock against the theory, but a knock against us. If mainline chruches are serious about JWT, maybe a first step would be to learn from the peace churches how they reinforce and inculcate the practices of peacemaking in their members.

  • William Cavanaugh, localism, and giving Just War theory teeth

    Eric directs our attention to this Godspy interview with Catholic theologian and “Radical Orthodoxy” fellow-traveler William T. Cavanaugh. He’s got some interesting stuff to say about globalization, the church, freedom, and just war theory among other things.

    I don’t agree with everything Cavanaugh says, but here are a couple of things that I thought were noteworthy:

    Globalization is an aesthetic which produces a way of looking at the world. It assumes that we’re a universal subject. We can go anywhere and do anything. But this has damaging effects. A few years ago my friends and I gathered for a dinner party and started discussing what should be done about Kosovo. I remember thinking how incredible it was that most of us had never even heard of Kosovo just a couple of weeks ago. But suddenly we’re all talking as if we know what’s right for this place on the other side of the world. It’s absurd.

    […]

    America in particular has this tendency to think it’s the universal nation, the exceptional nation, which means that we know what the solution is to everyone’s problems.

    I sometimes joke that if I were invited to give a commencement address—which I never will be—I’d never say the usual thing they tell the graduates: “Go out and change the world!” I’d tell them: “Go home! Go back to your little towns and please, dear God, don’t try to change the world!” The world has had enough of American college graduates who know what’s best for the world.

    He also talks about how the churches might give just war theory some bite when it comes to Christian participation in war:

    If we’re going to have a functioning just war theory, then we can’t abdicate this judgment to the leaders of the secular nation state, as if they can decide when a war meets Christian criteria and when it doesn’t. Historically the prince was traditionally responsible for making these kinds of judgments. But the prince in medieval Europe wasn’t outside the Church. This wasn’t a secular role, but a pastoral role within the Church.

    Also, individuals were never absolved of responsibility for deciding when princes’ judgments were just and when they weren’t. It’s always up to the individual to decide and to apply these criteria. And bishops and popes often intervened in these matters, excommunicating looters, imposing truces, interdicting the Eucharist, and so on. The recovery of the Church’s sense that it needs to be the place where these decisions get discerned is absolutely crucial, otherwise we’ve lost any sense of what it means to be Church.

    […]

    The first thing the Church needs to do is stop fighting unjust wars. Take the just war theory seriously. I’m not talking about pacifism. If there’s a war that the Church judges is unjust, then Catholics shouldn’t fight it. That’s the way the just war theory is supposed to work. It’s sometimes supposed to say ‘no’ to acts of violence. What the theory is usually used for, of course, is to justify whatever violence is going on. I can’t think of a single instance where it was used to stop violence. That is the most pressing issue.

    Imagine what would have happened if Catholics in the previous war had said in significant numbers, “No, sorry, this is an unjust war; we’re just going to sit this one out.” The world would have turned upside down.

    Of course, there may be a bit of wishful thinking in the idea that the church, even the Roman Catholic Church, will not only make definitive pronouncements on the justness of particular wars but get its members to go along with those judgments to the point of not participating in them. For instance, John Paul II and Benedict XVI may both have opposed the Iraq war, but neither one, to my knowledge, declared it unjust outright in any official capacity, much less forbade Catholics from participating in it.

    In the case of Protestant churches (which I realize Cavanaugh isn’t speaking about) it gets even muddier. Without a magisterium it’s not at all clear how they would make and enforce this kind of judgment. Or, for that matter, whether they should. Cavanaugh is surely correct in rebutting the charge of theocracy in recommending that Christians put their allegiance to Christ ahead of the nation, but there is a danger of a kind of ecclesiastic authoritarianism if we decide that the church should legislate on such matters for its members.

    But, in fairness, maybe this kind of top-down legislation isn’t what’s being recommended. Maybe a better way to think about it is that Christians who are formed, at the parish or congregational level, by worship, prayer, sacraments, study, mutual encouragement and consolation, fasting, almsgiving and other charitable works, and other traditional Christian disciplines will come to see the world differently and this will shape their response to decisions like this. But this also has to allow for the possibility of divergent responses among different Christians. Which is, perhaps, as it should be. In the course of a post on the present difficulties in the Anglican Communion, *Christopher linked to this piece by Fr. William Carroll on subsidiarity in the church. Carroll is writing about the strife over homosexuality, but the principles he outlines seem like they would have wider application:

    True subsidiarity empowers local bodies to incarnate the Gospel in their local context. Much like modern organizational theory, it pushes power and authority as close to the action as possible. This enables the Church to become more flexible and mission-driven. It also brings us closer to Gospel models of authority. … A more adequate notion of subsidiarity, which characterizes historic Anglicanism at its best, emphasizes that decisions should always be made at the most local level possible

    Shaped by the context of their local church, Christians may well come to different conclusions about questions of war and peace. But that’s to be expected; Christians come to different conclusions on virtually all matters of significance. Rather than diktats from above, congregational study of the principles of just war theory, for instance, might be one way in which a responsible deliberation about these matters could be incarnated at the local level.

  • Nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving

    Today’s Daily Office reading from 1 Timothy (4:1-16) gave me pause, verses 1-5 in particular:

    Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2 through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. 3 They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. 4 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving; 5 for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.

    As someone who tries to abstain from certain foods, it might be useful to think about what’s going on here. The context doesn’t make it clear, but it seems like Paul may be referring to a kind of gnostic tendency that takes a dim view of the body and material creation. At least that’s the impression I get from someone who would “forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods.” Paul suggests that such abstinence is an affront to God since the goods of this world were “created to be received with thanksgiving.” So, my sense is that Paul is dealing with a type of gnosticism rather than a “Judaizing” tendency that would insist on an observance of the OT dietary laws.

    And Paul elsewhere comes out strongly against the view that any part of God’s creation is unclean in itself; in 1 Corinthians 10 Paul seems to be advising his hearers not to eat meat sacrificed to idols if their eating it will cause offense to others, i.e. they will appear to be eating it as a sacrifice. But he goes on to tell them to eat “whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. For ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.’ If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience.” The idea seems to be that one should avoid meat sacrificed to idols not because there is anything unclean about it in itself, but because it may create the appearance that Christians endorse the sacrifice.

    A similar attitude may be at work in Augustine’s critique of the vegetarianism of the Manicheans. While many of the early Fathers were vegetarians or at least tended to abstain from meat, Augustine sharply criticized what he regarded as the Manicheans’ superstitious practices of not eating meat. There certainly is a strain of vegetarianism that avoids eating flesh in order not to “pollute” the self. And the Christian rejoinder is entirely proper: nothing is bad or “unclean” in itself; all things are created by God and, insofar as they exist, are good.

    However, are there grounds for abstaining from meat (or other foods) for other reasons of conscience? They key here seems to be provided by Paul himself when he says “nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving.” A surface reading of this would suggest that it’s enough literally just to give thanks to God for our food. And this is surely right. But I wonder if there’s more to be gotten out of the notion of receiving with thanksgiving than just that.

    Maybe “receiving with thanksgiving” implies an attitude toward creation which ought to be expressed in our practices of eating (among other things). How can we say we are receiving food with thanksgiving if, for instance, our methods of farming pollute and exhaust the land? Or, indeed, if farm workers are coerced or exploited? To receive with thanksgiving would seem to imply, at the least, respecting the integrity of creation. If someone gives you a gift, you don’t express gratitude by destroying it.

    Likewise with respect to animals. It would be odd, to say the least, if someone used this passage as a proof-text against vegetarianism and to defend current industrial farming practices. Few contemporary vegetarians adopt their diet for fear of being “polluted” by animal flesh, and one hardly shows respect for one’s fellow creatures by torturing them.

    But: aren’t I contradicting the Apostle here when he advises us against “raising any question on the ground of conscience”? The most accurate way of reading Paul here, it seems to me, is that he’s cautioning against ostentatious displays of one’s own oh-so-refined moral sensibilities. For, while he tells us not to ask questions about where food presented to us by a host comes from, he does say that we should refuse food if we’re informed by our host that it came from a sacrifice. And this is both for our sake and theirs. For, if we were to accept meat which we were explicitly told was sacrificed to idols, our host might take that as an endorsement of the idolatry, which could potentially lead them astray, possibly by reinforcing their own belief in the efficacy of the sacrifices.

    How might this translate in our contemporary world? For one thing, it cautions us against flaunting our scruples in front of others. But at the same time it warns us against setting a bad example or witness for others. In most cases only an insufferable prig would demand of his host whether the food being served was organic, fair trade, shade grown, etc. Surely the right thing to do is to accept the food offered with thanksgiving (both to the host and God). However, on other occassions it might be necessary or at least laudable to witness for a better way of interacting with creation. Just as there were idols in the ancient world, there are idols today: efficiency, profit, wealth, displaying a refined palate, or appearing sophisticated or worldly. There are occassions where it might be better to refuse something becuase not to do so will reinforce, in oneself and others, allegiance to these false idols. Refusing a modest meal from a friend is one thing; refusing foie gras at a fancy cocktail party something else.

  • Blasphemous bloggers?

    My only comment on the John Edwards/bloggers brouhaha is to note how deeply even “conservative” religious groups have drunk from the well of liberal interest-group ideology. For consider: all parties to the argument implicitly agree that the issue is one of bigotry – whether hatred was expressed toward a particular group of people – rather than, say, blasphemy.

    I realize you’re not going to get very far in modern America complaining about bloggers’ blasphemous remarks; it’s just interesting how religion is being assimilated to the category of a personal trait of its adherents, analogous to race or sex, rather than being about, y’know, God.

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion 13 & 14

    Augustine concludes his Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love with a discussion of Christ’s saving work, the forgiveness and new life we receive in baptism, and a brief meditation on the final judgment.

    Recall that for Augustine we are condemned on account of original sin – the guilt imputed to us because of our first parents’ sin – and actual sins we have committed (though infants are guilty only of the former). Christ, then, is the sacrifice that washes away all sins, original and actual. “Although he himself committed no sin, yet because of ‘the likeness of sinful flesh’ in which he came, he was himself called sin and was made a sacrifice for the washing away of sins.”

    Augustine goes on to describe how Christ takes away our sins in a way that to my ears sounds very Lutheran:

    The God to whom we are to be reconciled hath thus made him the sacrifice for sin by which we may be reconciled. He himself is therefore sin as we ourselves are righteousness–not our own but God’s, no in ourselves but in him. Just as he was sin–not his own but ours, rooted not in himself but in us–so he showed forth through the likeness of sinful flesh, in which he was crucified, that since sin was not in him he could then, so to say, die to sin by dying in the flesh, which was “the likeness of sin.” And since he had never lived in the old manner of sinning, he might, in his resurrection, signify the new life which is ours, which is springing to life anew from the old death in which we had been dead to sin.

    This passage hits a couple of favorite Lutheran themes such as the “happy exchange” and the notion of “alien righteousness.” Christ takes our sin and we receive his righterousness. We have no righteousness or standing before God of our own, but we have Christ. It’s very easy to see how passages like this influenced Luther.

    And we receive Christ and his righteousness by being united to his saving death in baptism:

    This is the meaning of the great sacrament of baptism, which is celebrated among us. All who attain to this grace die thereby to sin–as he himself is said to have died to sin because he died in the flesh, that is, “in the likeness of sin”–and they are thereby alive by being reborn in the baptismal font, just as he rose again from the sepulcher. This is the case no matter what the age of the body.

    In baptism we die to all our sins – original and actual – to all the sins which we have already committed by thought, word, and deed. This is true as much for the lifelong sinner as for the newborn infant. Since Christ died to sin once and for all, defeating the power of sin, we, in being joined to his death by the waters of baptism die to sin as well.

    The death of Christ crucified is nothing other than the likeness of the forgiveness of sins–so that in the very same sense in which the death is real, so also is the forgiveness of our sins real, and in the same sense in which his resurrection is real, so also in us is there authentic justification.

    Such a high view of justification by grace, though, always seems to raise the dread specter of antinomianism. If we’re forgiven and justified because of Christ’s righteousness and saving death, then why not go on sinning? Laissez les bons temps rouler!

    Of course we all know that Augustine, following Paul, when asked if we should sin more that grace may abound is going to respond: by no means! Christ, in his death, “died to sin” in the sense that he defeated its power. How much more, then, should we who are baptized into his death also “die to sin”? As the Apostle says “If we have died to sin, how, then, shall we go on living in it?”

    Part of the idea here seems to be that because we are so closely united to Jesus in his life-giving passion and resurrection, it would be a kind of performative contradiction to go on sinning. It makes no sense for me to say that with Christ I have died to sin but can nevertheless go on sinning. If I say that it shows that I either don’t really believe it or don’t understand it.

    Augustine points out that the entire sweep of Christ’s life serves as a model for the Christian life:

    Whatever was done, therefore, in the crucifixion of Christ, his burial, his resurrection on the third day, his ascension into heaven, his being seated at the Father’s right hand–all these things were done thus, that they might not only signify their mystical meanings but also serve as a model for the Christian life which we lead here on the earth.

    It’s interesting here that Augustine doesn’t advert to the teachings of Jesus as providing the template for the Christian life, but the whole shape of his life, especially his passion and resurrection. We are crucified with Christ, buried with Christ, and raised to new life with Christ. Quoting Paul again: “But if you have risen again with Christ, seek the things which are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For your are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

    There is, then, a kind of “because…therefore” structure to Christian ethical imperatives. Because we have died and been buried with Christ, we therefore are dead to sin. Because we have been raised with him, we therefore have new life. This is in contrast to a “if…then” form such as “If you want to be accepted by God, then you must do x, y, or z.” The Christian life grows out of the experience of being grasped by God’s grace (preeminently in the sacrament of baptism).

    Augustine concludes with a brief discussion of the Last Judgment. He acknowledges that Christians believe that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead, but he points out that “the living and the dead” can be understood in two different senses. It could mean, literally, that Christ will judge those who are alive here on earth and those who have already died at the end of the age. But it could also refer to the “living” as those who are righteous, or destined for God’s kingdom, and the “dead” as the unrighteous. The judgment of God would then reveal one’s status as belonging to one of these two groups (elsewhere Augustine talks in more depth how here below we can’t determine empirically who belongs to the elect and who to the reprobate). Of course, these two notions aren’t mutually exclusive; God may judge the living and the dead precisely by means of establishing who the righteous and the unrighteous are.

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion 12: The Incarnation and the Holy Spirit

    In chapter 12 Augustine considers the role of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation. Though we say that Christ was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, we don’t call him the son of the Spirit. Should we say that his divine nature is the Son of the Father but that his human nature was the Son of the Spirit? No, because that would divide his person.

    He goes on to discuss the various senses in which we might say something is born of something else and the different respects in which someone might be called a son (by birth, by adoption). His point is that not everything which is born of something else is called that thing’s son, nor are all sons sons by birth. One wonders whether part of Augustine’s intent here is to counteract attempts to portray Christianity as another pagan myth where the god impregnates a human woman with his offspring.

    So, we don’t want to call Jesus the Son of the Spirit, and yet the Spirit plays a special role in his conception and birth. Augustine’s explanation is to connect this to grace:

    Wherefore, since a thing may be “born” of something else, yet not in the fashion of a “son,” and conversely, since not everyone who is called son is born of him whose son he is called–this is the very mode in which Christ was “born” of the Holy Spirit (yet not as a son), and of the Virgin Mary as a son–this suggests to us the grace of God by which a certain human person, no merit whatever preceding, at the very outset of his existence, was joined to the Word of God in such a unity of person that the selfsame one who is Son of Man should be Son of God, and the one who is Son of God should be Son of Man. Thus, in his assumption of human nature, grace came to be natural to that nature, allowing no power to sin. This is why grace is signified by the Holy Spirit, because he himself is so perfectly God that he is also called God’s Gift. Still, to speak adequately of this–even if one could–would call for a very long discussion.

    Being born of the Holy Spirit indicates, then, that the unity effected between the human and divine natures is from first to last an act of God’s grace. This forecloses both adoptionism and safeguards the full humanity and full divinity of Jesus. Speaking of him as the Son of the Holy Spirit and Mary might indicate some kind of human-divine hybrid. Instead, the orthodox teaching is the human nature was fully united to the divine life, by grace alone, without ceasing to be human.

  • Faith seeking understanding

    Deconstructionist theologian Don Cupitt urges the church to trade in its traditional reliance on western metaphysics, the view that “behind the flux of experience there had to be something Real, one, intelligible to us, and perfect” with a radical rethinking of Christian faith based on a kind of post-Derridean anti-realism:

    We used to assume that we were presented with a ready-made world, with a built-in order that we were predesigned to be able to grasp. But since Kant, and especially through the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, the old western metaphysics has now been radically destabilised, deconstructed. The old west has gone.

    It’s not at all clear what this post-metaphysical Christianity would look like but Cupitt alludes to a faith that “cannot now be more than a practical orientation of our attention, our affections, our life towards One who is hoped for and believed in, but is not actually known.”

    I have three questions for Cupitt here. First, is he essentially attacking a straw man? The classical western theological tradition has never simply held to “a belief in one ready-made truth of things out there, waiting to be copied into our language.” There has always been a kind of dialectic between “negative” and “positive” theology and an awareness of the limits of our thinking to grasp the divine, balanced with the firm conviction that knowledge of God is possible.

    Second, he assumes the cogency of Derridean deconstruction with a kind of “everybody knows this” tone without anything by way of argument or evidence. What reason do we have to accept this? Not only is such a move far from universally accepted among theologians and philosophers (to put it mildly), it’s not clear what a cogent argument for anti-realism would even look like since, according to anti-realism, there’s no one way the world is, including, presumably, the way of being such that there’s no one way it is! (Or, more modestly, we know that the world is such that it’s impossible to know what the world is like.)

    Finally, what would be the point of a Christianity stripped of any reference to an extra-mental reality? And how would we go about practically orienting our lives toward a god about whom we know nothing? For all we know, selfishness and cruelty might be just as fitting a response as benevolence to a reality that is utterly denuded of knowable qualities.

    This isn’t to say that Cupitt hasn’t pointed out a real problem, namely the question of religious authority in a pluralistic “post-modern” world. But the proposed cure here seems worse than the disease.

    Of course, if Cupitt is simply exhorting us to a kind of epistemic humility (“One who is hoped for and believed in, but is not actually known”) then I don’t find that particularly objectionable. But, again, I think those resources are already there in the tradition. Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” implies that we don’t know but believe, and that belief can lead to greater understanding (though only in the next life will faith become sight). But neither does this preclude having true beliefs about God or making a fitting response to the divine reality. There is a wide middle ground between Cartesian certainty and postmodern nihilism.

    (Link via Thinking Anglicans.)

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion: 10 & 11

    We’ve seen that for Augustine the human condition is pretty dire. Humans, due to the sin of our first parents, find ourselves spiritually crippled and condemned to death, our wills utterly impotent on their own to change our situation. A rather grim situation.

    But of course, the Christian story is the story of God’s mighty acts to save his people. In chapter 10 Augustine considers the work of Christ. He notes that “the human race was bound in a just doom and all men were children of wrath.” Interestingly, “wrath” here seems to mean more than just the prospect of punishment at some future time. He quotes John’s Jesus to the effect that “he that believes not does not have life. Instead, the wrath of God abides in him.” Wrath is a state men are in, indeed born into. We might say that our sinful nature is what makes us liable to God’s verdict, or “wrath.”

    To turn away wrath, then, there was need for a Mediator. Augustine doesn’t go into detail about how Christ saves us, he simply says that “a Reconciler who by offering a unique sacrifice, of which all the sacrifices of the Law and Prophets were shadows, should allay that wrath.”

    There’s a longstanding debate between Catholics and Protestants over whether justification is a verdict whereby God declares us innocent on account of Christ’s sacrifice, or on account of an actual change in us worked by grace. At least here Augustine can seem to take both views. He says that Christ’s sacrifice allays wrath, but also says that “we are reconciled to God through the Mediator and receive the Holy Spirit so that we may be changed from enemeis into sons….” This would seem to suggest that we become sons by the Holy Spirit working some actual change in us. We’ll come back to justification in a later chapter, so things may be cleared up a bit there.

    Augustine spends the rest of chapter 10 discussing the two natures of Christ. He is careful to assert that it is a complete human nature which is united to the divine Word, not simply a body which has the Word as its soul. He also denies what would come to be called “subordinationism,” the view that there is inequality between the persons of the Trinity:

    Accordingly, in so far as he is God, he and the Father are one. Yet in so far as he is man, the Father is greater than he. Since he was God’s only Son — not by grace but by nature — to the end that he might indeed be the fullness of all grace, he was also made Son of Man — and yet he was in the one nature as well as in the other, one Christ.

    In Chapter 11 Augustine goes on to discuss the Incarnation as “the Prime Example of the Action of God’s Grace.” Human nature didn’t merit to be united to Godhead, it was an act of sheer grace on God’s part. And Jeus was God’s Son from the very beginning of his existence – there is no hint of Adoptionism here. “Indeed it was Truth himself, God’s only begotten Son — and, again, this not by grace but by nature — who, by grace, assumed human nature into such a personal unity that he himself became the Son of Man as well.” Note here the reversal of the Son of Man/Son of God distinction characteristic of the Fathers; in the Bible the “Son of Man” can be a semi-divine eschatological figure, whereas many humans (such as David) can be referred to as a “son of God.” The Fathers, however, tend to reverse this usage and use “Son of Man” to Jesus considered in his human nature, and “Son of God” according to his divine nature. The point, though, is that the Son of God is the Son by nature, but he takes human nature to himself by grace.

    And this graceful uniting of the human and divine natures is the work of the Spirit: “This same Jesus Christ, God’s only Son our Lord, was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. Now obviously the Holy Spirit is God’s gift, a gift that is itself equal to the Giver; wherefore the Holy Spirit is God also, not inferior to the Father and the Son.” The same Spirit which overshadowed Mary also calls us out of our sin and changes us from enemies to sons of God.